Excellent. Thank you, Martin. Didn't need any kernel tweaking... my
/dev/cdrom was a link pointing to the wrong place. After a little
poking around, I figured it was at /dev/hdc. Listening to a CD right now!
(Still don't know why it worked in my other kernel, but I really don't
care. 2.6 is rockin!)

Thanks,
Jim
Martin Habets wrote:

First of all, check your dmesg output for ide and hde (and maybe SCSI)
related messages. Post that if it doesn't make complete sense.
It seems strange to me that your cdrom drive would be hde. Do you have
disks on hdb thru hdd?
Check lsmod to see if any scsi modules are loaded (I don't think they
should be).
Regarding you .config, I have CONFIG_IDE_TASK_IOCTL turned on as well.
Maybe most CD players use this raw access, I don't know.
Martin